Product Description

Vurt is a feather--a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colors: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows--the feathers from which there is no escape. The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister. Helped by his gang, the Stash Riders, hindered by shadowcops, robos, rock and roll dogmen, and his own dread, Scribble searches along the edges of civilization for a feather that, if it exists at all, must be bought with the one thing no sane person would willingly give.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #96666 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 342 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780312141448
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
If you like challenging science fiction, then Jeff Noon is the author for you. Vurt, winner of the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke award, is a cyberpunk novel with a difference, a rollicking, dark, yet humorous examination of a future in which the boundaries between reality and virtual reality are as tenuous as the brush of a feather.

But no review can do Noon's writing justice: it's a phantasmagoric combination of the more imaginative science fiction masters, such as Phillip K. Dick, genres such as cyberpunk and pulp fiction, and drug culture.

If this tickles your fancy, you should definitely consider the sequel to Vurt, Pollen, or Noon's lighter and more accessible Automated Alice, a modern recasting of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

From Publishers Weekly
British novelist Noon debuts with a futuristic tale of a hallucinogenic drug that spins users into virtual worlds.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
William Gibson meets Lewis Carroll in this novel of future England, a time when humans, robots, virtual beings, and their various crossbreeds coexist and, as their primary recreation, indulge in drug-laced feathers that induce a virtual reality state known as "the Vurt." Living on the edges of this strange new world are narrator Scribble and his scruffy gang, the Stash Riders. After a mysterious feather named "Curious Yellow" causes Desdemona, Scribble's sister and lover, to become trapped in the Vurt, Scribble becomes obsessed with rescuing her. His quest for another Curious Yellow takes him on a vertiginous journey through the squalid Manchester streets and deep into the shadowy depths of the Vurt. Humorous, horrific, and wildly original, Vurt is an imaginative triumph. Highly recommended.
--Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

This book is only for some (Glorious for some)
Please don't read Vurt if you are a sub-culture literature snob. And don't read it if you are a Sci-Fi elitist. And if you like to intellectualize the merit of a work against the established canon (even if that canon is considered cultish or underground or whatever) or critique it within a particular lineage, please stay clear of this book.

I can see why this book is not for all. I can even relate with the negative reviews it has been receiving on this web site. If I were to remove myself from the emotional and the more intuitive responses this novel evokes in me, I too might label it drug-obsessed and not the most original; or the writing style somewhat pretentious and over-the-top.

But, whether because I stem from a culture of electronic music, psychedelic drugs, and crusty fashion or because I tend to romanticize everything in life to death, this book has captured and moved me deeply.

So please, read this book if you too are a dreamer, like me. And read it if you've ever found yourself looking over that field of shattered glass, like an illusion gleaming, hiding the scum and the stench of Anytown-Bottletown, hoping for something better. Searching for a reality more satisfying than this, because you've always known this world is not your own. Linking the hunger with sexual love then discovering (in letting it go) that the insatiability goes far beyond.

It's about escape. This book is a momentary escape.

A hyperreal wonderland
Noon catapults the reader into world in which the boundaries between dreams and reality have collapsed. The unreal becomes more real than the real. A hypnotizing adventure, I read it in a single spellbound sitting. I cannot recommend this book enough. Inspired.

A Feather Full of Dreams
"A young boy puts a feather into his mouth..."

From the first sentence of the book, I was drawn in. I forced myself to read only one chapter at a time, to actually consider what I'd read and let it sink in, and that made this book that much richer. To me, it heralded back to Clockwork Orange. The Stash Riders (made up of Scribble, Beetle, Mandy, and Bridget) have their own vocabulary grown from the world they inhabit - where feathers can hold their fondest dreams or worst nightmares, where the worst poison comes from dreamsnakes, where pure is poor, and where shadowcops lurk above every all-night Vurt-U-Want.

Scribble is a young man, not so out of the ordinary, who wants nothing more than to have his sister back again. That want drives him to a destiny he'd not even considered, gaining and losing almost everything in the process.

I'm enamoured with this book. It stays on my nightstand so I can hear Scribble tell his story whenever I want. Let Jeff Noon take you into his tangibly ethereal world.